“They’re not supporting the troops. They’re undermining them,” Cheney told a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition at the oceanside Ritz-Carlton hotel in Manalapan, Fla., about 60 miles north of Miami.

I guess your idea of support would be to degrade and throw those same troops you claim to support to the side and treat them like non-citizens! Your view of this world must be to deny that they are even wounded, and refuse to help them after they put their lives on the line. Maybe that keeps the statistics down for you huh?

Jon Town has spent the last few years fighting two battles, one against his body, the other against the US Army. Both began in October 2004 in Ramadi, Iraq. He was standing in the doorway of his battalion’s headquarters when a 107-millimeter rocket struck two feet above his head. The impact punched a piano-sized hole in the concrete facade, sparked a huge fireball and tossed the 25-year-old Army specialist to the floor, where he lay blacked out among the rubble.

“The next thing I remember is waking up on the ground.” Men from his unit had gathered around his body and were screaming his name. “They started shaking me. But I was numb all over,” he says. “And it’s weird because… because for a few minutes you feel like you’re not really there. I could see them, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear anything. I started shaking because I thought I was dead.”
Eventually the rocket shrapnel was removed from Town’s neck and his ears stopped leaking blood. But his hearing never really recovered, and in many ways, neither has his life. A soldier honored twelve times during his seven years in uniform, Town has spent the last three struggling with deafness, memory failure and depression. By September 2006 he and the Army agreed he was no longer combat-ready.

But instead of sending Town to a medical board and discharging him because of his injuries, doctors at Fort Carson, Colorado, did something strange: They claimed Town’s wounds were actually caused by a “personality disorder.” Town was then booted from the Army and told that under a personality disorder discharge, he would never receive disability or medical benefits.

Town is not alone. A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits. The conditions of their discharge have infuriated many in the military community, including the injured soldiers and their families, veterans’ rights groups, even military officials required to process these dismissals.

They say the military is purposely misdiagnosing soldiers like Town and that it’s doing so for one reason: to cheat them out of a lifetime of disability and medical benefits, thereby saving billions in expenses. LINK.

Yet you want to make claims that you cannot support the troops, and all the other rubbish that the right wing spews. I guess Walter Reed is just a minor glitch to you huh? I guess that is the real way you support the troops. I guess the aftermath was just hogwash to you, and was just a political ploy huh? I guess all is a myth to you.

Cheney called it a myth that “one can support the troops without giving them the tools and reinforcements they need to carry out their mission.”

Would those tools include proper body armor and armored Humvees? Now who supports the troops you moron? Not enough people and not enough equipment to start the job with, and yet you want to cast off your bondage on others shoulders. It is you that hates America! You hate our troops, except when they can be used as a photo-op. You sir, are a disgrace to not only our troops, but to our whole nation. May GOD have mercy on your soul on the day that your heart attacks exceed your deferments!

As a Vietnam veteran, VP Cheney impresses me as a man of great arrogance and little substance. Both he and “The Decider” sucessfully avoided serving in Vietnam. Then they had the audacity to accuse Senator John Kerry as being both a coward and a traitor during the vicious 2004 campaign. The Swift Boat campaign against him was based on lies. Mr. Kerry has more pride in country, integrity, and honor than these creeps will ever have.
Dan Rather was canned from NBC basically because of doing some sloppy homework. However, his premiss that Papa Bush pulled strings to get keep little Georgie stateside is undenyably true!
We, who want the troops home, are supporting them!! How can they be so dense as to not see that. As of this minute we have lost 3029 GIs in a war which was based on false intelligence information. Then President Bush had the audacity to present CIA Director Tenant with a medal of honor. Isn’t it amazing that the jerk who was responsible for getting us into this mess was rewarded for his work? Wish my job worked like that!
If Bush and Cheney think their pre-emptive invasion was so patriotic, why aren’t any of their children suited up to serve? Prince Harry, second in line for the British throne, is serving in Iraq. One might think that our President’s and VP’s families were the royals and not the opposite way around.
King Bush has committed so many impeachable offenses in his 6.5 years that I can’t believe he is still serving. Clinton committed a moral indiscretion but IT WAS NOT IMPEACHABLE. Yet, the Star Commission spent millions of dollars in a bogus attempt to oust him. This administration has sacrificed thousands of servicemen and many thousand innocent Iraqi civilians in a war which was concocted. They need to concentrate on Afganistan and Pakistan. This in the region from were we were attacked on 9/11. We were not attaced by Iraq!! The most nobel jesture, in the support of our troops, is to bring them home ASAP!!

Twas a good day for a rant! 😆 So Pamela, who’s winning, you or the bookwork? Does anyone know anything about http://www.diatribune.com ? I got an invite to crosspost there. Gonna have to check them out. They emailed me, so the least I can do is take a look.

A good rule of thumb is never trust anyone who believes that we lost in Viet Nam. True, the casualties were horrendous, but we ended that in the only good way that was available. We left.

A lot of horrible things will happen in Iraq if we leave. On the other hand, the nature of that place is that these very same things will happen if we stay longer, they will just happen at a later point in time. And our casualty count will grow.

When Collin Powell said of Iraq, “if we break it, we own it” he meant that some mistakes are so serious that they can never be made right. We’ve already made the mistake, and, sadly, nothing can keep the consequences from flowing. We can leave and affirm to the world our sincere intention to learn from the neo-con blunder, but this is something that can never be made right.

You’ve got to give Cheney alot of credit. He’s got lots of mileage out of the “support the troops” smoke screen. Unfortunately most Americans bought it and refuse to admit that we’ve destroyed a country, created a failed state and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, created nearly 2 million internally displaced refuges and another 2 million that have fled the country.
And what do we argue about? Whether or not we support the troops. Whether or not the country will go into chaos if we leave! HELLO ! It’s not exactly a picnic for the Iraqi’s over there right now.

I’m a VN veteran myself but I believe the troops shouldn’t be there. Individually I support them. As a whole, I think the military in this venture called Iraq is nothing more than mercenaries for the oil industry. Cheney’s private army to use and abuse.

Support the troops, what a novel idea. As Goring said at the Nuremberg trials. “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

I don’t think I am winning – not yet at least. I am gaining on it but have so much still to do and then my daughter and I have to hit the road next month and go visiting somer University of CA campus to decide which one she’s going to attend.

I hadn’t heard of diatribune.com but I have barely had time to read the blogs of late with all this college preparation stuff for my daughter.

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